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search engine (and Search engines in general) such
huge flatteners. Never before in the history of the
planet have so many people – on their own – had the
ability to find so much information about so many
things and about so many other people.
Said Russian-born Google cofounder Sergey Brin, “If
someone has broadband, dial-up, or access to an
Internet cafe, whether a kid in Cambodia, the university
professor, or me who runs this search engine, all have
the same basic access to overall research information
that anyone has. It is a total equalizer. This is very
different than how I grew up. My best access was some
library, and it did not have all that much stuff, and you
either had to hope for a miracle or search for
something very simple or something very recent. When
Google came along, he added, suddenly that kid had
“universal access” to the information in libraries all
over the world.
That is certainly Google’s goal – to make easily
available all the world’s knowledge in every language.
And Google hopes that in time, with a PalmPilot or a
cell phone, everyone everywhere will be able to carry
around access to all the world’s knowledge in their
pockets. “Everything” and “everyone” are keywords
that you hear around Google all the time. Indeed, the
official Google history carried on its home page notes
that the name “Google” is a play on the word “googol”;
which is the number represented by the numeral 1
followed by 100 zeros. Google’s use of the term reflects
the company’s mission to organize the immense,
seemingly infinite amount of information available on
the Web, ‘just for you”. What Google’s success reflects is
how much people are interested in having just that – all
the world’s knowledge at their fingertips. There is no
bigger flattener than the idea of making all the world’s
knowledge, or even just a big chunk of it, available to
anyone and everyone, anytime, anywhere.
“We do discriminate only to the degree that if you can’t
use a computer or don’t have access to one, you can’t
use Google, but other than that, if you can type, you can
use Google,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt. And surely
if the flattening of the world means anything, he added,
it means that “there is no discrimination in accessing
knowledge. Google is now searchable in one hundred
languages, and every time we find another we increase
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FMS Dec 2010
it. Let’s imagine a group with a Google iPod one day and
you can tell it to search by voice – that would take care
of people who can’t use a computer- and then [Google
access] just becomes about the rate at which we can get
cheap devices in to people’s hands”.
How does searching fit into the concept of
collaboration? I call it “informing.” Informing is the
individual’s personal analogue to uploading,
outsourcing, in sourcing, supply chaining, and offshoring.
Informing is the ability to build and deploy
your own personal supply chain – a supply chain of
information, knowledge, and entertainment. Informing
is about self-collaboration – becoming your own selfdirected
and self-empowered researcher, editor, and
selector of entertainment, without having to go to the
library or the movie theatre or through network
television. Informing is searching for knowledge. It is
about seeking like-minded people and communities.
Google’s phenomenal global popularity, which has
spurred Yahoo! and Microsoft (through its MSN Search)
also to make power searching and informing
prominent features of their Web sites, shows how
hungry people are for this form of collaboration. Google
is now processing roughly one billion searches per day,
up from 150 million just three years ago.
The easier and more accurate searching becomes,
added Larry Page, Google’s other cofounder, the more
global Google’s user base becomes, and the more
powerful a flattener it becomes. Every day more and
more people are able to inform themselves in their own
language. Today, said Page “only a third of our searches
are U.S.-based, and less than half are in English.”
Moreover, he added, “as people are searching for more
obscure things, people are publishing more obscure
things,” which drives the flattening effect of informing
even more. All the major search engines have also
recently added the capability for users to search not
only the Web for information but also their own
computer’s hard drive for words or data or e-mail they
know is in there somewhere but have forgotten where.
When you can search your own memory more
efficiently, that is really informing. In late 2004, Google
announced plans to scan the entire contents of both the
University of Michigan and Stanford University